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Jean Phillippe Rushton, a Canadian psychologist with some, er, interesting theories around racial differences, has died at the age of 68.

Rushton’s infamous theory about race and intelligence can be summed up in two words: size matters.

He postulated that brain and genital size are inversely related, implying that whites are more intelligent than blacks and that Asians are the smartest of all.

Rushton asked some of his first-year students to fill out surveys about their penis sizes, the number of sexual partners they had, and how far they ejaculated. He’d go to local malls and pay folks to do the same. (He was reprimanded for not getting permission from his university to do these studies.)

The problems with the underlying premise are kind of obvious. Race doesn’t have neat, discrete “scientific” edges. The respondent’s answers can’t be verified and these are exactly the kinds of questions that folks like to embellish or polish. (Uh, people tend to be a little touchy about this kind of stuff.) “Intelligence” is really, really hard to quantify and doesn’t appear to be a static thing. And the myth of the gargantuan Negro wang isn’t based on some empirical truth; it blossomed alongside the idea that racist laws were need to suppress and control black men, who were hypersexual predators who were chomping at the bit to ravage and rape white women. My hunch is that the myth of less-endowed Asian men is rooted in some other sort of shaky sociopolitical pretext for oppression, but I’m shaky on the historical specifics. (Anybody wanna school us here?)

Not surprisingly, Rushton was embraced by racist and nationalist groups who wanted to cover their noisome views with a patina of intellectual credibility. Other academics, though, didn’t think his work amounted to much; they said it lacked rigor and that Rushton ignored research that contradicted his claims.

Rushton took his ideas on the road in 1989. He presented his views to a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

It did not go well.

Association officials called a news conference the same day to attack what the association’s president called Rushton’s “highly suspect” research. A spokesman for the AAAS, Earl Lane, said Thursday: “For now, I think we’ll have to just say that the quick actions of the association officials, in holding a press conference to refute Rushton’s research and his ‘highly suspect’ views, speak for themselves.”

Hmm. Maybe Frances Cress Welsing, another doctor of the mind with some cockamamie* ideas about the relationship between wangs and race herself, was onto something!

On both St. Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, the white male gives gifts of chocolate candy with nuts…. If his sweetheart ingests “chocolate with nuts”, the white male can fantasize that he is genetically equal to the Black male…. Is it not also curious that when white males are young and vigorous, they attempt to master the large brown balls, but as they become older and wiser, they psychologically resign themselves to their inability to master the large brown balls? Their focus then shifts masochistically to hitting the tiny white golf balls in disgust and resignation — in full final realization of white genetic recessiveness.

Okay, nevermind. That’s just nuts crazy as balls ridiculous.

*I know, I know.